Interview with Olivia
Ed - this book is compiled by Barry Scott from interviews on his Lost 45’s radio show throughout the years.
Nashville artists were in an uproar when Olivia Newton-John won the Best Country Female Vocalist Grammy in 1974. In doing so, she beat Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette, Dolly Parton, and Tanya Tucker, four of country music’s legends. Olivia was the first English-born performer to take home the coveted American award, usually reserved for country purists. The furor over her accomplishment eventually quieted, leaving Olivia to break new boundaries as the saddle-shoe-and-cardigan-sporting good girl turned leather-clad bike chick in the movie Grease. Through it all, Newton-John was never absent from the pop charts from 1973 through the rest of the decade and on into the eighties.
“Livvy” was born in Cambridge, England, to a Welsh father and German mother. Her grandfather was a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, reportedly friends with Albert Einstein. The hyphenated last name is the combination of a couple of ancestors, although Olivia can’t recall who. When she was five, her father moved the family to Melbourne, Australia, where he became dean of Ormond College. Although she had no musical training, young Olivia began making up tunes on her father’s piano and listening to his large record collection. “According to my mother I used to always harmonize and sing around the house a lot,” Olivia says.
When she was eleven, her parents divorced and her father moved away from the family. At age twelve, Olivia won a Hayley Mills lookalike contest sponsored by a local cinema and then formed an all-girl group, the Sol Four, which sang primarily jazz standards. She started appearing on an Australian television program called “Go Show.” During high school, Olivia entered another competition, with the enthusiastic support of friends and audience members. The resulting award would help start her career.
“I won this talent contest when I was fifteen,” recalls Olivia. “The prize was a trip to England and some spending money. My decision was whether to stay in school or to leave and take the trip [she laughs]. I left and took the trip!” Olivia went to London with a fellow cast member from the TV show, Pat Carroll. They formed a duo and toured successfully among the many pubs in the area for two years. Then Pat’s visa ran out and she returned home. Olivia stayed. She recorded a couple of solo singles, while continuing to perform live. At one of these shows, Don Kirshner, who was later responsible for the development of the TV show “Rock Concert,” asked her to join his latest musical creation.
“I was in a group called Toomorrow,” Olivia says. “We made a feature film. The people that put us together were the same people who put the Monkees together. They hoped that we were going to have a film career like the Monkees did, like a series of films. It didn’t work, but it was a great experience. I traveled and went to America and did all kinds of fun things. That was on for two or three years of my life, like sixty-eight to seventy or seventy-one. Then, I made my first record in seventy-one.”
Prior to this time, Olivia was unable to achieve any chart success. “I really didn’t have a recording career in Australia,” she says. “I was just on television. I had my first success in England, before I came to America. It was a real gradual process. Luckily, I had as my manager Cliff Richard’s manager, so I started singing with Cliff and we got along really well. I was on his television show. It just grew from there. Then I had my first hit in England, which is the Bob Dylan song, ‘If Not for You.’ In those days, you were either a ‘folkie’ or a ‘rocker’ [she laughs]. I was a folkie. It took off in America also, but I didn’t have another hit in America until seventy-four, so I think I’ve had a wonderful career, it’s just slowly climbed up.”
Olivia started her chart career by appearing with Cliff Richard on his television show. Cliff is a legendary British performer best known in the U.S. for Top 40 records like “Devil Woman” and “We Don’t Talk Anymore.” In England, Cliff” s career is similar to Elvis Presley’s in the States. He has been hitting the charts since the mid-fifties with his backup group the Shadows, and continues to record today. 01ivia explains how she met Cliff Richard: “I had a boyfriend at the time [Bruce Welch] who was in the group the Shadows, so I got to know him socially. He was looking for a girl to do a duet with him. We tried out together and our voices went really well. I started working with him on his television show and toured with him and did his backups and everything. Cliff and I have a long association. I think he’s wonderful.”
The admiration is mutual: “I feel very honored because when I’m in America,” says Cliff, “and people don’t know who or what I am, I always say, ‘Do you know Olivia Newton-John?’ I say I helped discover her. I had a TV show running in Britain and Olivia had made her first record. She came on to do one show. We sang a duet. She sang her single and there was a fantastic reaction. She was on my TV show regularly. So I feel I kind of presented her to the world. I feel proud of Olivia, because she’s been so fantastic and so huge in America and is such a great artist and a nice person. I don’t think she’ll mind me telling you this. I love her dearly as a person. She is perfect.”
For the two years following her debut chart hit, Olivia released a string of unsuccessful singles in the U.S. Finally, “Let Me Be There” became her first million-selling Top 10 smash. It was written by John Rostill who, like Bruce Welch, was a member of the Shadows. The song won her the country Grammy award that caused such a stir in Nashville. “I wasn’t really aware of the big differentiation between country and pop,” says Olivia, “because in England it’s all one chart. That’s where I’d been living. When I heard there was all this hoo-hah about my winning, I was as shocked as anybody else because I really didn’t know the difference. It was the beginning of the cross-over. I think John Denver and I were the first pop artists to really cross over to country. A couple of people were really mad, but since then I’ve found out that they are really now quite happy because it’s opened doors for them too.”
By receiving acceptance among country fans, Olivia opened up the gateway for other artists to cross over to the pop charts. The initial trickle turned into a flood by the end of the seventies, with performers like Anne Murray, Kenny Rogers, and Dolly Parton hitting the pop chart.
Olivia reached the Top 10 again with “If You Love Me (Let Me Know),” a “Let Me Be There” sound-alike also written by John Rostill (who died before its release). By this time, her producer was John Farrar, who also wrote and produced most of the hits that followed. Olivia met John through her old singing partner from Australia, Pat Carroll, who had married him. Together, John Farrar and Olivia Newton-John would be responsible for five #1 hits. The first single to reach the top was “I Honestly Love You” in 1974. The song was written by singer/songwriter Peter Allen, who died of AIDS in 1992. Allen had not even had a chance to record his own version when Olivia heard his demo and loved it. The song won her another Grammy award, this time in the Pop Vocalist field.
The follow-up tune, “Have You Never Been Mellow,” was written by John Farrar, and “Please Mr. Please” was the last of her five-in-a-row streak of million-selling tunes. The latter song was written by two members of Cliff Richard’s Shadows, John Rostill and Bruce Welch. (Bruce and Olivia had been engaged, but broke it off in 1973.) Olivia has positive feelings toward all the records that came out of her early seventies chart career: “I have fond memories of all of them now. It’s so funny when I think ‘If Not for You,’ was a song that I didn’t like [she laughs]. My manager and producer thought it would be a good song for me. I was really in the beginning guided by them. Then I did ‘Let Me Be There’ and ‘If You Love Me (Let Me Know),” which I like very much. ‘Please Mr. Please’ is one of my favorite country songs. I like all of them, really.”
After 1975, things began to slow down for Olivia on the charts. She released a string of six records that did not make the Top 10, but her albums, six in a row, continued to go gold. One of Olivia’s biggest singles during that period was a song written by her Australian mates the Bee Gees called “Come On Over.” Prior to her next project, “I Honestly Love You” was re-released and almost made it into the Top 40 again in late 1977. Her Greatest Hits Vol. 1 collection went platinum and Olivia starred in her first American TV special in 1976. She hosted a few more specials over the next five years (including a 1978 show that featured a rare appearance by Abba), but the first phase of her chart career was clearly coming to a close.
The next period would involve Olivia with the most successful movie musical of the rock era. Grease was originally a Broadway musical that opened in 1973. Olivia was asked to do a part in the film by director Allan Carr, whom she had met at a party thrown by Helen Reddy. Olivia was unsure about the role at first, but the transformation of her Sandra Dee character from sweet and innocent to tough and ready convinced her. “When I read the script, that’s what excited me about it,” she explains. “I thought, heavens, this is gonna be great. I’ll get the chance to be a little bit different. That gave me the room to change my career. That was an acting part, but it also gave me the chance to change my career’s focus a little bit and so I did a little bit more ‘rocky’ stuff after that. It was the perfect time.”
John Travolta, hot off his phenomenal screen success with Saturday Night Fever, co-starred with Olivia in Grease, which opened during the summer of 1978. Included was much of the original score from the show, plus a few additional songs written for the movie. The new tunes turned out to be the most successful on the pop charts. One of them, a John Farrar penned duet, “You’re the One That I Want,” became a #1 single in America. The second top single was Frankie Valli’s version of the title track, written by Barry Gibb of the Bee Gees. Another Travolta/Newton-John duet, “Summer Nights,” reached the Top 10 in the States. Over in England, the two duets were even more popular, spending fifteen weeks at #1 between them. Olivia’s Top 5 ballad, “Hopelessly Devoted to You,” rounded out the American hits from the motion picture. The soundtrack album sold twenty-four million copies, ranking it behind Saturday Night Fever as the second biggest of all time.
“You hope,” says Olivia, “but I don’t think we had any idea that it would be the hit that it was. I don’t think the film company had any idea. I don’t think they really knew what they had [she laughs]. All I know is a lot of love and energy went into it. It was a lot of fun to make and I think that’s what probably showed.”
With the new image of leather-clad Olivia in the forefront of the public imagination, the time was right for a musical change. On her next album, Totally Hot, Olivia experimented with harder sounds and reached the Top 5 again with “A Little More Love” in 1979. The album contained a rock ‘n’ roll remake (“Gimme Some Lovin’”) as well as the title dance/disco track. Early in 1980, Olivia released a hit duet with Andy Gibb, “I Can’t Help It” (#12/1980). The duo recorded two songs together before his death.
“I knew him very well,” Olivia says about Andy. “It’s a tragedy to me that he’s no longer here. I hadn’t really seen him much for the last few years, because I had a child and he was in Miami a lot. But we had been very close at one point when I made the record with him. He was very talented and very sweet. It’s a real loss for everyone.”
After the enormous success of Grease, Olivia searched for another movie musical in which to act. Her next film was based on the Kubla Khan stories of the Far East. Olivia starred as a muse who helps a struggling musician and a wealthy older man, played by Gene Kelly. Xanadu did not exactly energize her acting career. The musical fantasy opened in the summer of 1980 to poor reviews. “The music was great and the dancing was great,” says Olivia about Xanadu. “I think what was wrong was the script. I think the music parts that John Farrar wrote were wonderful. It’s very interesting to me; it wasn’t a box office success, but when I meet people, young people who saw the film, they really loved it. It seems to have been a great success on home video anyway.”
The music from Xanadu was another story. The soundtrack and all of the released singles, including those featuring Electric Light Orchestra, were huge hits. Olivia’s “Magic” became a #1 record and the pairing of Olivia and E.L.O. helped the title track go Top 10. The band scored two million-selling Top 20 records with “All Over the World” and “I’m Alive,” and Olivia reached the Top 20 with “Suddenly,” a duet sung with the star who helped launch her career, Cliff Richard. The soundtrack went on to sell over four million copies worldwide.
Olivia also got the chance to dance with her idol, Gene Kelly. “That would be one of the major thrills of my life!” she exclaims. “Obviously, everyone has seen Gene Kelly dance. I was first nervous about that fact, because I’m not really a trained dancer. I worked really hard to learn the routines for the film. That was fantastic. He’s a lovely man. He was very helpful and it was a great experience.”
The movie is special to Olivia for another reason today: “I met my husband on that film [she laughs]. He was dancing in the film. He was rehearsing with me and he became a friend first. We used to spend a lot of time together. It blossomed from there.”
Olivia married Matt Lattanzi in 1985. During their early eighties courtship, she released a single that would tie the all-time record for longest stay at the top of the charts. Until then, this distinction was held by Debby Boone’s seventies movie ballad, “You Light Up My Life” (#1 for ten weeks). Steve Kipner, one of the writers responsible for what would be Olivia’s biggest hit, recalls how she came to record “Physical” in 1981. “I had always imagined someone like Rod Stewart or a male singer singing that song,” Steve says. “It never even occurred to me a girl would sing it. I had a manager who was also working for Olivia’s management company. I went in to play the demo of the song. Olivia’s manager was also managing Mr. Universe and heard my song through the walls and thought, ‘If Olivia did that song, I could get a picture of Mr. Universe on the album cover with her. That’s a way I can promote him also.’ By pure luck, Olivia was coming into the office. I’d known Olivia since Australia, but I never tried to sell her any songs. She happened to come in and liked the song. They recorded it. At the last second, she was worried it was a bit risque and that a lot of her fans would be offended, because it definitely had a sexual connotation. That was the reason they came up with the idea of doing the video with all of the exercising. They released the video before the single [to get that image in mind first].”
With the release of “Physical,” Olivia had completed her transformation from pure country/pop ballad singer to a rocker. The record was the biggest seller for all of 1981. With its suggestive lyrical content, complete with lines like, “There’s nothing left to talk about, unless it’s horizontally,” the song was banned at some stations worldwide, most notably in South Africa. As usual, the resulting waves of controversy made it climb to the top even more rapidly.
“It was the aerobics/physicality era just beginning,” Olivia states. “I just managed to hit it right on the nose with what was happening at the time. Plus, it was slightly risque enough to catch everyone’s curiosity. Also, it was so against what people thought of me. It was a bit of shock value. It’s a great song, basically. I think anyone could have done it. I was just lucky with the song.”
Lucky Olivia reached the Top 10 in 1982 with “Make a Move on Me” and “Heart Attack.” She starred in one more ill-fated film in the early eighties, a movie which re-teamed her with John Travolta. Two of a Kind was a cinematic flop, but did contain two more Top 40 hits, including the #5 smash, “Twist of Fate.” Up until this point, Newton-John has been unable to reach the Top 10 again.
During the early eighties, Olivia opened a chain of clothing stores, based on Australian styles and colors, with her friend Pat Carroll. For a while the new company, called Koala Blue, was quite profitable and expanded into over sixty markets in three years. But the rapidity of the expansion, coupled with the downturn in the U.S. economy in the early nineties, caused the new venture to file for bankruptcy late in 1991.
Recordings were sporadic in the mid-eighties and the early part of the nineties for Olivia. The Rumour in 1988 was not a big hit, and contained a few tracks, most notably the title cut, that were definitely overlooked by radio. As with most artists whose beginnings were traced back to the seventies, Olivia found it quite difficult to get radio stations to play her new material. “I feel very proud of that album,” says Olivia. “It didn’t receive much attention, but I feel good about that album, personally anyway. I co-wrote a lot of the songs and I feel that they reflect things I was thinking about in my life. I can’t sing about things that I don’t feel about or care about. In that album, I sing about ecology and role reversal in marriage and divorce. Things that are really important to me now.”
Olivia worked with her friend Elton John on the title track of The Rumour, a song that he co-wrote with Bernie Taupin. “It was wonderful working with Elton John,” Olivia laughs. “It was a great kick. He’s a riot. He has a wonderful sense of humor. I don’t think the public really know him that way, but he’s a very, very funny man and obviously brilliant. He wrote that song. I asked him would he write one for me and two weeks later it was written. He went to Bernie Taupin for the lyrics and Elton wrote the melody in four hours. I mean, that takes incredible talent. He played on the track and did the vocal backings with me. We had a great time.”
As to why radio stations ignored the album and song, Olivia is unsure: “I don’t know why these things happen. Maybe I’d been out of it for a long time. I hadn’t had a record out for three years. The business has changed a lot. Radio, I think, has changed a lot. I really don’t know why people choose one thing over another, but I wish they would have played it [she laughs]. I’ve had a few songs on my albums that I think would have been hits if they’d had the airplay, but if you can’t get initial airplay, then the public doesn’t know. I [spoke] to fans who didn’t even know that album was out, which is really sad to me because I spent a lot of time on it. But without radio play, nobody gets to hear it, unfortunately. That’s how the system is. Maybe I’ve been around too long, I don’t know.”
Because of familial responsibilities, Olivia has pretty much stopped touring. She admits to not really enjoying it very much anyway. “I enjoyed the actual concerts,” Olivia reveals, “but touring is very exhausting. I had a lot of fun. I have wonderful memories of touring. I always had great people with me and everything, but it’s a very strenuous life. I think I’ll become a homebody now.”
Olivia gave birth to a daughter, Chloe, in 1986, who has affected her career in myriad ways. “My husband and Chloe are the most important things to me,” Olivia explains. “These early years of a child are very important and they need you with them. I’ve really cut back on things and I won’t do anything unless she can be with me, basically.”
Currently, Olivia lives in Malibu Beach with her husband, daughter, and a whole menagerie of animals. She recorded a children’s album, wrote a children’s book, and is heavily involved in environmental work. “I’m a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations’ environmental program,” Olivia proudly says. “I’ll be doing work for them. With my group called ECHO, which is a group of people in the entertainment industry, we’re basically trying to get the problems of the environment to the public through the media. We’ve seen the walls in Eastern Europe come crumbling down and if they can do that, we can make all these changes we’ve got to make to improve the quality of our lives again [she pauses]; make a good life for our children. Make sure they have clean air and clean water and clean food to eat. That’s what really got me involved, because I have a little girl. That’s really the thrust of my life right now, because I’m so concerned for her future.”
With all of her current projects, Olivia isn’t sure if there’s time for a new album or movie: “I’d like to do a film sometime, but I’d like it to be something based around an environmental story. With my work now, if I can incorporate something that I feel strongly about with the job that I enjoy doing, then I feel like I’m achieving more. That’s what I’d like to do. I’m very content. Things that I do now are kind of icing on the cake. My life is wonderful, very full. I’m very happy. I’d like to write more songs and I’d like someone else to record something I wrote. That would be nice.”
So, if anyone would like to record an original Olivia Newton-John song, call her publisher today. In the meantime, there are two full Greatest Hits collections out, the Grease video is still one of the all-time movie rental favorites, and you never know when Olivia might grace the screen, record stores, or radio next. She has proven herself capable in a variety of entertainment fields and as soon as her daughter grows up, Olivia will most likely launch her next comeback attempt. Her fans are ready and waiting.